Frances Bula

When I went to visit a friend in very suburban Tsawwassen recently for the first time in years, I felt bad for him as I parked in his building’s lot. Sigh, I thought. Another bland and boxy apartment that plonks...

Walk around Seattle’s South Lake Union these days, and it feels like it’s exploding with new life and development. The once-industrial zone is now a hodgepodge of shiny, futuristic office towers that house 21st-century businesses ranging from Amazon to biotech...

By winning the BC Liberal Party leadership, Kevin Falcon just made a high-profile return to politics after several years in property development. As the former MLA and cabinet minister gears up to take on the NDP in the next provincial election, we dug...

Linda and Patrick Power looked at downsizing from their Burnaby house a few years ago as they were approaching their 65-year marks. The four flights of stairs were just going to get harder to navigate. And taking care of the...

Michael Heeney has a theory about the future of this region as people continue to flood into the eastern suburbs. Downtown Vancouver will become less attractive to businesses run by that increasingly large proportion of suburban residents. It was a convenient...

Lori Fell got a job a year ago as a human resources assistant at a major grocery and housewares store. The good, steady-paying work was a satisfying reward for having gone back to school in her 40s after being laid off from...

Scott Jacob has worked in construction for 30 years. He’s seen a few recessions. But never the kind of meteor hit that happened last March, when pandemic lockdowns and panic arrived in B.C. The company he and his brother run, Jacob Bros Construction, had a dozen contracts for various improvements—parkades, asphalt aprons—at Vancouver International Airport. They were cancelled instantly, stopped mid-project with an urgent request that Jacob get his crews offsite as fast as he could...

Blaine McNamee had already brought the dead back to life once in B.C.’s retail world. Then the pandemic came. McNamee is the guy who took over the empty storefront that had been home to the cherished Wonderbucks on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive—an...

Emad Yacoub has survived downturns before. It was very rough during the 2008 world meltdown triggered by the collapse of the U.S. housing market. But even in the worst of times, his Glowbal dining empire, which today consists of nine...

Doug McCallum regained the Surrey mayor’s chair last fall by offering easy-sounding solutions when it comes to policing, transit and real estate development. The veteran politician says he’s changed along with B.C.’s second-largest city, but is he the right person to lead it into the future?

Louie Quilt hefts a sheet of drywall into a box about the size of a cabin sitting in the middle of the shop floor, the next step for what will become a compact studio apartment for a not-so-well-off resident of...

A note from the author: Modern-day elections are famous for their last-minute dramas, with candidates getting knocked out of races as problematic information emerges about their pasts, as they stumble in the public spotlight, as their campaign strategies blow up...